∞ /notes/micropub-indieauth-and-posting-to-my-own-site-with-microblog | 2017-11-12 | web programming

Micropub, IndieAuth, and posting to my own site with Micro.blog

Been learning about Micropub and IndieAuth while setting up my Micro.blog. Posting with 3rd party client to my own site, without having to handle auth myself. Cool stuff! ✨ — http://fsteeg.com/notes/1509136632711

Micro.blog is “a new social network for independent microblogs”. It’s something like Twitter based on open web standards. This is what I learned when setting up my Micro.blog for posting to my own site.

Micro.blog supports the Micropub W3C recommendation for posting content on the open web. It does so in different ways. For me, the relevant one was that you can use the Micro.blog iOS and Mac clients to post content to your own site using Micropub. On the implementation side, for me this mainly meant handling x-www-form-urlencoded POST requests. Internally, I create the new post in my system, which is picked up by Micro.blog from my site’s RSS stream.

A crucial part of posting is authentication and authorization, otherwise anyone could post to my site. Micro.blog supports IndieAuth for signing in with your own domain name. The actual OpenID login can be delegated to GitHub or Twitter. As with owning your content by owning your URLs, even if it’s hosted elsewhere, we use our own site as our identity, not our profile on a 3rd party site, even if we delegate the actual login. On the implementation side, for me this mainly meant adding link elements with specific ref attributes to my site’s HTML sources.

A final cool thing that Micro.blog has, and that is relevant for my own site, is support for the Webmention W3C recommendation. For each reply to my posts on Micro.blog, it sends a Webmention to my site, so I can link back to these mentions of my site on the web. On the implementation side, for me this again mainly meant handling x-www-form-urlencoded POST requests. Internally, I add links in my system’s HTML sources according to the Webmention’s source and target values.

I found it quite exciting to see how Micro.blog really provides the glue for building something like Twitter based on open web standards. Actually building an IndieWeb, “a people-focused alternative to the corporate web”, is on all of us.

As mentioned above, Micro.blog is different things in one. If you don’t run your own site, you might care about its Wordpress support, or its hosted blogs, or something else. Let me know if you’d like an invite code.